Category ►►► La Casa Blanca

May 8, 2013

"What Difference Does It Make!" -- On 2016?

PolitiFact Wisconsin has done us a great service by resurrecting Hillary "Hell to Pay" Clinton's January cri de coeur (rather, hysterical, squeaky, falsetto, voice-cracking, calculated screech) anent the Benghazi terrorism:

Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?

The attack (even the White House now admits it was an al-Qaeda terrorist assault) killed four Americans -- Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and two embassy security personnel, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Ten others were wounded in the attack. But a few days after, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice rushed onto nearly a thousand Sunday talk shows to pitch the rewritten, reelection-friendly talking points of the Obamunists: That the attack was unplanned, not premeditated, and was in fact an out-of-control movie review.

The PolitiFact piece is part of an "occasional feature" called In Context, a.k.a. the lazy man's journalism; it consists of taking some controversial statement, quoting several of the paragraphs surrounding it, and calling it a news story. But it is useful, providing a longer length of rope by which those afflicted by foot in mouth disease, such as Madame Erstwhile Secretary, can hang themselves all the quicker.

In context, Clinton's "What difference at this point does it make!" ejaculation is even worse than what we thought from the video snippet in January. We thought she had simply lost her temper after being badgered, bear-baited, and hogtied by some sneery senator. But the In Context piece shows a very different story: The shriek heard round the world was a planned evasion of a simple but devastating question, one that Clinton would surely know was coming -- but for which she had no good answer.

The questioner who extracted the Scream was Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI, 100%). And he really had only one simple, substantive question: Wouldn't a simple phone call to the survivors and evacuees, even a couple of days after the fact, have told us that there was no "demonstration" or "protest" prior to the assault? Therefore, that it was indeed a planned and executed terrorist attack.

Johnson asks his question several times:

Did anybody in the State Department talk to those folks very shortly afterwards?...

The point I’m making is, a very simple phone call to these individuals, I think, would’ve ascertained immediately that there was no protest prior to this.... Why wasn’t that known?...

But, Madame Secretary, do you disagree with me that a simple phone call to those evacuees to determine what happened wouldn’t have ascertained immediately that there was no protest? That was a piece of information that could have been easily, easily obtained?

But to each attempt to get Clinton to explain why she couldn't have found out almost immediately what really happened -- terrorism, not a spontaneous protest against a YouTube video -- Clinton evades, sidesteps, and tapdances... because she knows very well that, had she made that phone call, she would lose her plausible deniability; she would have owned the Big Lie of her subordinate, Susan Rice. Here are Clinton's "answers":

[O]nce the assault happened, and once we got our people rescued and out, our most immediate concern was, number one, taking care of their injuries.... We did not think it was appropriate for us to talk to them before the FBI conducted their interviews. And we did not -- I think this is accurate, sir -- I certainly did not know of any reports that contradicted the [Intelligence Community] talking points at the time that Ambassador Rice went on the TV shows.... Was information developing? Was the situation fluid? Would we reach conclusions later that weren’t reached initially?... [W]hen you’re in these positions, the last thing you want to do is interfere with any other process going on, number one.... Number two, I would recommend highly you read both what the ARB said about it and the classified ARB because, even today, there are questions being raised. Now, we have no doubt they were terrorists, they were militants, they attacked us, they killed our people. But what was going on and why they were doing what they were doing is still unknown --

Did I miss an actual answer in that pot of message? I mean, something like, "Yes, I could have called them and found out"... or even, "No, I couldn't call them, any of them, even days later, because my boss put the kibosh on any investigation until after he was safely reelected."

At the end, Johnson draws the only conclusion possible:

No, again, we were misled that there were supposedly protests and that something sprang out of that -- an assault sprang out of that -- and that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact, and the American people could have known that within days and they didn’t know that.

And that was when she unleashed her staged and rehearsed banshee wail, the silencing scream of the outraged woman under sexist assault by a Republican Fascist:

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?

Of course she didn't dare answer! The simple and honest response to Johnson's question is, Yes, I could have found out immediately; but if I did, how could I safely send Siouxsie out to lie to the American voters just before President B.O.'s reelection?

Her hands were tied; rather, they were wired firmly over her ears. There are some things Man, or in this case a reasonable facsimile thereof, was not meant to know.

And don't think that Madame can just walk away from it. To paraphrase Josef Mengele in the Boys From Brazil: She betrayed her ambassador; she betrayed her oath of office; she betrayed her country!

If she chooses to run for president again in 2016, I expect her primary opponents won't forget to remember her lies, her multiple betrayals, her treasons, stratagems, and spoils. I stand by my prediction that Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham will never, ever be the Democrat nominee for president.

June 28, 2012

Class Dismissed

La Casa Blanca

Hatched by Korso

Back in 1960, when John F. Kennedy ran for president against Richard Nixon, legend has it that JFK summed up his opponent thusly: "No class." Of course, this came from the guy who played pass-the-intern with his buddies around the White House swimming pool -- but even if the fantasy of Camelot didn’t quite square with the truth, you had to hand it to the president’s handlers for getting the right kind of image out. That kind of branding would give Apple a run for its money.

Ah, for the days of yore. Nowadays, Barry-O’s people can’t even handle a simple Gay Pride Day at the White House without causing a national flap -- or flip, as the case turned out to be. No doubt you’ve gotten wind of the Bird Seen Round The World, a tawdry but amusing episode in which LGBT activists from Philly (great cheese steaks, questionable neighborhood) started feeling their druthers and decided to show a portrait of Ronald Reagan how they really felt about the Gipper’s tenure as president. Then, to make absolutely certain that they weren’t misunderstood, a few of them took to Facebook to post pictures of the event--along with some commentary the likes of which you might find on the bathroom walls of your better truckstops.

Is it just me, or has it been nothing but downhill for Facebook ever since the IPO?

Anyway, all of this would have been bad enough, what with all of us right-wing fuddy duddies caterwauling on Fox News about the total loss of decorum at the White House; but to top it all off, even the guests were riffing on the dreariness of the affair. Sayeth Philidelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal:

We come up to the main foyer, and what do they play? Barbra Streisand. 'The Way We Were.' And I thought, Are they going to play nothing but Barbra, Bette and Lady Gaga? I was waiting for ‘Over the Rainbow.’ I mean, this is the Marine band!

One could only image the chaos if the Marines had struck up a chorus of Gloria Gaynor.

Once the dust settled, a White House spokesman popped off a rather limp rejoinder to its boys and girls gone wild, but by then the damage had been done. Much like the biker gang did to Wyatt’s house near the end of Weird Science, the Gay Pride crowd took a sledgehammer to Barack Obama’s already teetering reputation and then left.

This still, however, begs the question as to why the revelers felt the freedom to cut loose like they did at the home of the President of the United States. Perhaps it was just a kindship they felt with the administration -- but I also can’t help but think maybe they were simply following Obama’s example.

In spite of all the ink spilled on the president’s worldiness and sophsitication, he sure hasn’t shown a lot of it over the last three and a half years. We are, after all, talking about the same man who gave the Queen of England an iPod, slipped the Dalai Lama out the back door, and attempted to hijack wedding registries all over the country.

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